Not to beat around the bush, today is the official birth of a collaborative project between TF2tv, VanillaTF2, and a prospected development of the old ETF2L radio – VanillaTV. I don’t have the habit of pulling Dr.Philian greek philosopher quotes outta my ass, but I can’t think of a better wording for the motivation our project. ETF2L radio had a strength in its quality control, and the share spectacle of any cast they did to prove it. TF2tv had a notorious chase for providing a quantity of match coverage to the masses, with consistency in streams and video on demand. With VanillaTV, we want to combine those strengths in one place, together with all the discussions and information surrounding our games. On a foundational level, the decision is a no brainer.

The hard decision, was done by Byte (ETF2L radio), Comedian (TF2tv), and their respective teams. The merger of the 3 services requires forsaking certain liberties and hours of former work hours for structure, for the sake of “the greater (longterm) good”. It’s a mature and noble decision, one deserving recognition.

The project won’t be a revolution, and there’s no intention of patting ourselves on the backs just yet. Like the birth of this very news site, it will be a continuous work in progress – iterative solutions, with hopes of as much help and contributions from anyone interested, as possible.

If grabbing a cold beverage out in the sun doesn’t appeal to you, there’s 3 nerds talking live on mumble tonight. Pledge returns with regular Torden, and iSeries organizer, Tapley. There will be a look at recent movements, games and events, as well as what’s in store in the near future

iSeries has ended. None of the competitive teams decided to make an effort and show up, except for Tt, who lost in the finals to some div7 also-thermaltake shitnerds.

It wasn’t the prize money being too low (higher than i39/i40), or the date that was bad (same as i39), teams simply decided not to bother.
TCM, Dignitas, Redcode and Power Gaming, they all decided not to show up. This is how a game dies. The veterans no longer care.

100% of prem teams @ i42

We all booed DrGonzo, for his article on how small TF2 was at i41, claiming how it was intentional, that i42 would show TF2 going strong again. But we’ve failed, i42 was nothing special, not anywhere close to the spectacle that was i39/i40.

So what’s on the horizon for TF2? The best thing that might happen is a proper TF2 tournament at Dreamhack, partly sponsored by Valve maybe? Is this going to happen? Only dunc knows.

Stealing Dignitas' seats

On a positive note, the casting/coverage was at least as good or even better than it has been for earlier iSeries. Cadred had some excellent articles and TF2TV covered all the matches that mattered.

But good coverage is not going to keep the game alive. It’s good tournaments with decent prize money and high level teams attending, showing off great games of TF2 for big crowds. We’ve done this before, what’s keeping us from doing this again?

This match has been hugely anticipated – with the winner of this getting to represent the United Kingdom in the ESL Country Championships, along with a massive amount of bragging rights.

Seeing numlocked step into what has come to be known as “Byte’s team” must’ve been a boost for the entirety of Team UK1 – numlocked has been playing really well since coming back to TF2, dishing out so much damage since joining Button Bashers it was unreal.

Pre match talk from honeymustard and minimoose commentating was mainly based around the fact that joske was playing scout – the consensus seemed that UK2 were putting themselves at a disadvantage by putting him up against the scout team of Greg and fisshu – who honeymustard stated had been playing decently recently.

First of all, a big thanks to honeymustard and minimoose for casting, and the entirety of the TF2TV team, where you can watch the game again via the VODs.

Now, read on for the full rundown/wall of text, bought to you by / Trell!

The 3 day AsiaFortress Mercenaries Cup kicks off tomorrow with some huge matches. All eight teams will be seen in action during the entirety of the night. TF2TV is going to be there live to cast the heavyweight matches between the all-star Australian team – fml who will take on Thanatos as well as the newcomers Masterful who go against BiAB.

Join Comedian with a special surprise guest host as they tackle the Asian scene and bring you their insight and bad jokes!

So, the epic.lan Grand Finals are finished leaving Infused.tt to collect their winnings and Monster Munch to contemplate where it all went wrong. The title of this piece comes from the famous call made mid-match against Gibbz Goes Prem by Infused.tt’s SoniXzr. When winning two nil SoniXzr suggested his team sat back and waited for Gibbz’s team to push by telling them to “park the bus,” much to the amusement of the spectators and greeted by sheer bewilderment by the rest of his team. Needless to say however their traffic related tactics won through, and perhaps more teams need to adopt some of their own public transport calls if they hope to win at lan.Transport-based communication or not, after what has been one of the tightest set of tournament matches I’ve had the pleasure to witness it’s easy to see how the result could’ve swung the other way, and both teams truly deserved their places in the finals for simply having their nerves hold out this long.